Self-Mythology

On Body, Self, Lineage and Identify: A Review of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology

University of Arkansas Press (March 2024)

In Saba Keramati's debut, Self-Mythology, the reader grapples with the multiplicities, complexities, and brunt of endings that lead us back to the beginning. We are immediately bothered with the politics of the body—how the body is also a metaphor for borders—through the emphatic exploration of identity, diaspora, and the search for belonging in an America that often feels like an ill-fitting garment. Born to Chinese and Iranian immigrants, Keramati navigates multiracial sophistications in a society that demands precise categorization while also scuffling with the weight of her parents' exile and the limitations of language in capturing the nuances of her experience.

Keramati invents or employs form as weaponry, engaging in a poetic war with herself that is reflected in her poems. Her arsenal of poetic structures challenges and subverts the notion of a cohesive identity. From the searing confessionalism of her free verse to the political and identity relevance of the invented ghazals and the disorienting collage of her centos, Keramati's formal experimentation mirrors the fractured and hybridized nature of the diasporic experience. As Patricia Smith notes in her foreword, the poems in Self-Mythology “unreel with revelation, undaunted soul-searching, and crisp, deliberate lyric.” This lyricism, however, is always in tension with the jagged edges and dissonant juxtapositions of Keramati's choices.

Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the use of the cento form, which appears in three separate poems throughout the collection. By stitching together lines from other Asian American poets like Kazim Ali, Chen Chen, Aria Aber, Ocean Voung, Solmaz Sharif, and others, Keramati creates a kind of Frankenstein's monster of diasporic experience, a patchwork quilt of voices and identities that resists easy categorization or assimilation. In the hands of a lesser poet, this technique might come across as gimmicky or derivative, but, as Smith writes further, “Keramati avoids the many pitfalls of addressing a complex identity—you won't find confounding DIY tanglings of language or an unwavering eye fixed on the myriad metaphors of culture clash.” Instead, Keramati's centos serve as a kind of meta-commentary on the limitations and possibilities of language, reminding the reader that even our most intimate and authentic expressions are always already haunted by the voices of others. In this way, formal innovations are not merely stylistic flourishes but rather a radical reimagining of what it means to speak as an Asian American, as a woman, and as a poet in the 21st century. 

Throughout the collection, Keramati engages in the process of personal mythology by weaving together the disparate threads of her cultural heritage, family history, and individual struggles to create a narrative that is deeply personal. In the poem “There is No Other Way to Say This,” she lays bare the sense of fraudulence and fragmentation that often accompanies multiracial identity:       

These lines highlight how language can feel like a betrayal of one's true self and the sense of dislocation that comes from existing between cultures. This is even further highlighted in the poem's almost android-like structure, which has multiple arms as if the poem is reaching for something farfetched and unreachable. Keramati's use of Chinese and Farsi characters alongside English underscores how her identity is shaped by multiple linguistic and cultural traditions, even as she struggles to claim any of them entirely.

This sense of fragmentation is further explored in the poem “Self-Portrait as Two,” in which Keramati writes:

          A twin. Exposed heart stretching outward. Two things can be true at once.
          Scissors and blood. In the mirror: a body. Cut the stray hairs around brows and
          lips. Hold the blade against the left thigh. Press against existing stretch marks.
          Skin trickles red: alive, but less. Cut the right thigh, too. One eye smaller than
          the other. Hand pressed against glass hand.

The imagery of twinning and mirroring in this poem suggests how multiracial identity often involves a sense of internal division and self-scrutiny. The self-investment of cutting oneself to fit into acceptable social brackets by the speaker in this poem—as if the poem, the book, or Keramati is asking, Where do I go now? What do I do with this body, this lineage, myself?

Careful, tender, yet heart-wrenching, this topic of identity. Throughout history, writers have been going to the market in search of their true selves, as if the self presented is never enough. I am held breathless through Keramati’s account of loss, especially if you are lost in a room full of your own lineage.

Keramati’s inquisitions bring her to the political and urgent. In “Those Who Live” the poet addresses the murder of Vincent Chin and the broader struggle for Asian American visibility and justice: “His ghost always with me but unnamed / for so long. I had to google the mural in memoriam, / across from the new dog hotel and tattoo parlor.” Here, Keramati is full of questions and answers—knowledgeable and innocent in her wonder. These lines are a searing indictment of the way in which the lives and deaths of people of color are so often erased and forgotten by mainstream American culture, relegated to the margins of history and memory. By invoking Chin's ghost, Keramati pays tribute to his life and legacy, insisting on the urgent necessity of collective remembrance and resistance in the face of ongoing violence and oppression. For Keramati, this theme is visceral. In “The Return," she carries in one hand the weight of her parents' past and the way in which it continues to haunt and shape her own sense of self. “I ask my father if I am covering my hair for god / or for men, and he says, Government, / which feels like he is saying both,” she writes, capturing the suffocating sense of double consciousness that comes with being a child of refugees.

Self-Mythology notes Keramati’s languages—their impossibilities and failures to capture the full nuance of identity. Here, I pause, staring blanky at the poet’s wonder—how a poem can collect and recollect many buttons of wisdom from the same jar. Keramati questions how language itself is always already implicated in structures of power and domination, the way in which even our most intimate and authentic expressions are shaped by the discourses and ideologies that surround us. In “The Birth of Language,” she writes:

          God made, and so he birthed,
          and so he was a mother.

          He can make anything sound beautiful.

Look at how language obscures and mystifies oppression and violence. In this poem, the poet recognizes her power to be lord over her own subject, puts God in his own Eden, watches Him, takes and gives His power simultaneously, studying God’s act of protest. But Keramati's interrogation of language is not just a matter of abstract philosophical speculation. Concerning itself with personal and embodied struggle, this collection seeks a way of speaking that can do justice to the full complexity of her own experience.

In “What's Lost” she writes: “There is so much left to understand. / There are things I do not know about my ancestry / because I am afraid to ask.” These lines capture the painful sense of alienation and disconnection that comes with being a child of diaspora, how the very language we use to describe ourselves can feel like a foreign tongue, a tool of estrangement rather than expression. And by wrestling with these limitations and failures, Keramati exposes the inadequacy of our current linguistic and conceptual frameworks. She also gestures towards the possibility of new inclusive ways of speaking and being, new forms of expression.

Keramati also fearlessly navigates the labyrinthine terrain of mother-daughter relationships, shedding light on how the weight of family history and cultural expectations can both nurture and suffocate a woman's sense of self. Both “Ode to Birthmark” an “Self-Portrait with Womanhood” lay bare the reality of the female body as a battleground, a space where the demands and experiences of motherhood can dramatically reshape a woman's identity, often in ways she never could have foreseen.

Yet, Keramati's exploration of these themes transcends mere personal reflection, instead serving as a blistering critique of the patriarchal systems that seek to control and constrain the lives of women and girls. In “Self-Portrait with Womanhood,” she writes, "I confess I want a daughter but my stomach / already hangs too far out, folds / in on itself when I bend. I do not pretend / it doesn't, nor do I shave the thin / trail of hair that lines it." These words are not just a personal confession; they are a war cry, a defiant refusal to conform to the suffocating standards of beauty and femininity that society imposes upon women's bodies. By unapologetically claiming her right to exist in her body on her own terms, Keramati asserts her own agency. The poet also blazes a trail for inventive new ways of embodying womanhood in the 21st century. Her poetry is an invitation, a challenge to reimagine gender in ways that shatter the limitations of our current cultural and political landscape, and to celebrate the power and resilience of women who dare to define themselves.

The poems are tender in ways in which they search—and rupturing in the ways they find. Keramati embarks on a formidable odyssey of self-discovery, deftly navigating the treacherous waters of identity formation and the relentless pursuit of belonging. Through a masterful wielding of language and audacious experimentation with form, Keramati constructs an intensely intimate mythology that illuminates her trajectory, serving as the poignant bible to the multifaceted struggles of the Asian American diaspora and the migration and exile experience. Her poems stand as a resounding affirmation that identity is not a static, monolithic entity. Through the poems, we see that identity is an ever-evolving, protean narrative that must be continually reshaped and redefined in response to the vicissitudes of lived experience. In the concluding poem of the collection, “Feast,” Keramati employs a striking culinary metaphor to encapsulate the quintessence of this transformative process:

          The eye of the fish in the hot pan stares at me.
          It changes color as it cooks. The savor fills our home.
          I am hungry. I want to eat.

These lines, imbued with a palpable sense of yearning and urgency, invite a profound contemplation on the nature of identity as a perpetual feast, a nourishing [or not] and transformative act of self-creation and consumption. Just as the fish undergoes a metamorphosis in the crucible of the pan, its flesh transfigured by the alchemy of heat and spice, so too does the self undergo a continuous process of transmutation, shaped and tempered by the inexorable forces of lived experience. And just as the aroma of the feast suffuses the domestic space, creating an atmosphere of warmth and abundance, so too does the ceaseless labor of self-mythologizing permeate the innermost recesses of the psyche, forging a sense of unity and belonging that transcends the reductive binaries of race, nationality, and cultural affiliation.

Keramati's poetry would ask us to look into our own horoscope of self and trace the lines through lineage. It would also summon us to confront the manifold complexities and contradictions of the human condition. Through her incandescent verse, she invites readers to embark on their own intrepid journeys of self-mythologizing, to excavate the hidden depths of their own psyches and to forge their own paths to meaning and belonging amidst the labyrinthine complexities of their lives.

Self-Mythology triumphs at showing that poetry can give voice to the ineffable, wresting meaning from the chaotic fragments of living. The question most often asked in the real world, “Who are you,” is answered in multiple poems in the collection. Keramati weaves a luminous of the self, a mythos that is at once intensely personal and universally resonant. Language becomes a potent tool of revelation and regeneration, marking new worlds and new selves from the ashes of the old. The poems resist, raise the banner of protest, telling the world to listen, learn how I want to be identified, and accept it.